Obama’s Nuke Plan came under fierce attack from the right, most noticeably from Sarah Palin. Well it appears that some retreat on the plan has begun.
Today on “Face The Nation” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates started walking back the idea that the US would not retaliate with nukes after a WMD attack.
The Obama administration's nuclear posture review may have removed some of the intentional ambiguity from U.S. nuclear policy, but it does not leave the country any less safe, President Obama's top national security advisers said on CBS' "Face the Nation."
In fact, they said, it gives a clear warning to other state actors that the U.S. will not ignore any growing threats.
"This is putting everybody on notice," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told CBS News chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer in an interview conducted Friday at the Pentagon. "We don't want more countries to go down the path that North Korea and Iran are."
The revised nuclear policy says that the United States will not use nuclear weapons to respond to a chemical or biological attack from a non-nuclear country. The policy, however, leaves significant contingencies, said Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
Countries which are non-signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (such as North Korea) or have been found to be non-compliant (such as Iran) are not exempt from nuclear retaliation under the Obama policy.
"We were concerned about the biological weapons," Gates said, "and that's why the president was very clear ... if we see states developing biological weapons that we begin to think endanger us or create serious concerns, that he reserves the right to revise this policy."
Clinton added, "If we can prove that a biological attack originated in a country that attacked us, then all bets are off."
Even with such retreats, I still do not see what is benefit to explicitly spelling out our nuke policy. As I mentioned before all it seems to do is take some of the sting out of our deterrence. The idea that others will follow our lead, particularly North Korea and Iran, is a pure pipedream.
Something tells me if Palin delivers another stem-winder, the Obama administration will retreat further on this plan.
Via: Memeorandum
Via: CBS News